Money Questions. No Answers.

The longings that threaten to swallow us whole.

Moonrise over the Farm last evening. Photo by Catherine Eskilstark.

I dedicate this week’s newsletter to the inspiration I have received over the past week from two courageous storytellers, both of whom have decided to make their work available with no barrier to access and asked to be sustained. I’m just not alone in this and never was. The first, a post from

Elizabeth Oldfield

that served as the nudge I needed to lean toward this week’s piece:

Where your treasure is

The second, an absolutely stunning film from Mattias Olson at Campfire Stories:

Both of these artists are making active requests for financial sustenance. If they lived closer, I would fill their refrigerators with food from the Farm.

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Greetings Neighbors and Strangers,

How many dollars do you shepherd?

I had a look in the account last evening in preparation for writing this long-overdue love song to the shadowy corner of our shared life we call money. 

I tried six different combinations of username and password before I gained access to the bank account—so long it’s been since I signed in.  It’s a marvel the system didn’t flag me as a thief.    

Last March, at a meeting with the extended Farm family, I pledged to keep my personal bank account under $4K by transferring any excess to the Farm account, now a nonprofit.  Once that transfer goes through tomorrow, the Farm will have $15K.  Adam’s personal account will then be back down to $4K.   

How many dollars do you shepherd?

The morning before last I left the house at first light with a knife in my hand.  An hour later, the flock numbered two fewer.  The unlucky ones wore ear tags with the symbols 105 and 65.  They descended from two of the fabled founders of the Gift Flock.  Deep-voiced Beatrice begat small-framed Bonnie, who birthed the remarkable twins Billie and Bonita.  Bonita with the black spots on her ears begat Bella, the sole ewe remaining in that line.  I killed her yet-unnamed son, the remarkably handsome number 105. 

Tia came into the flock that first year alongside Beatrice.  Like the other matriarchs, I purchased her with dollars.  I sold bread back then, and so I traded some of my bread money for four female sheep.  Tall Tia begat equally-tall Thalia, who got a long leg tangled in a hay feeder as a young lamb.  Freeing the leg and dressing the wound begat in Thalia an unparalleled affection for me and then, by association, all humans.  When Thalia’s vagina prolapsed last spring, a tragedy she and her yet-unborn twins survived, her lineage became a dead end.  Shepherds don’t risk re-breeding ewes who have prolapsed.  Or their daughters.  Number 65 was Thalia’s yearling daughter.  Tia’s grand-baby.  My notes say that I’d named her Tina.  As the flock grows, I find it harder to keep track of all the names.  I’m not proud to say it, but it’s true. 

How many stories and names do you try to remember?

I don’t often go out to the field to kill sheep without another human by my side.  The rattle of alfalfa pellets in a wooden trough tempted Tina/number 65 to push her head into the shoving crowd.  I caught her by an unguarded back leg.  Sharp knife, clean cut, severed spinal cord—I tucked a handful of fresh grass between her clenched jaws as the bright red life she carried, and surely cherished, soaked through my work pants to stain the living skin of my precious, working knee, the same knee that would push hard to haul her heavy body back up the hill in the wheeled cart, to the spot where Lindsey worked, carefully skinning the great-great grandson of old Beatrice, the two of them bathed in the warm light of a new day.    

It is remarkably difficult to count a flock of sheep in the field, such are their constant movements.  I can’t actually tell you the number of the living here at the Farm right now.  Occasionally I come upon them all laying down, but the moment they sense my approach they’re up and headed in my direction, looking for something that they are sure I will provide for them if they let me know their desires with sufficient and insistent volume.  It took me several years to translate their deafening greeting song from sheep into English.  It goes like this: “More, better, now!”  Silence returns with a patch of fresh grass.  Always. 

My people have been living with and from sheep for a very long time.  When they became Christians, they adopted and adapted a sheep-keeping word from their conqueror’s language to describe the responsibilities of the community’s spiritual custodian.  A pastor was a keeper of sheep before she became a shepherd of human souls.  Humans and sheep, as well as the grasses, soils, sunlight and rain showers that underwrote them, may have been harder to divide out back then.  Counting and dividing are closely related activities. 

I have imagined the day when a few of my ancestors first traded the bright red life carried by one of their wool-clad beloveds for a handful of silver coins.  The hungry human person handing them coins was a Roman soldier, himself a war prisoner and conscript from another corner of the empire—himself a bundle of displaced allegiances born of an abject homelessness. He has been charged with collecting taxes on the tip of a sword. 

The soldier hands them the coins.  They hand over their family member.  Then they hand him back the coins to pay for the continued right to inhabit the green hills that, just that morning, and every morning prior, had been granted to them anew as a gift from their Givers-of-Life, their God(s).

I have imagined that their capacity for gratitude began to atrophy on that day, as did their ability to resist the soul-destroying seduction of grievance.  Could a whole society be built upon a steady diet of low-grade resentment, envy and shame?  Such a world would have been unimaginable to those sheep-people as they stood on the threshold of the civilizing/counting/dividing project. 

How many dollars do you shepherd?

After flirting with the notion of voluntary poverty—or voluntary impoverishment—for several years, I finally looked up the word “poor.”  Freed from its crushing overlay of societal disdain, the word means simply “having few or no possessions.”  The word possession denotes land or other materials that have been seized and turned into property.  A second meaning of possession came into the language a bit later: being set upon or seized by demonic forces.  It is interesting to imagine the changes afoot in the psyche of the Roman oligarchs who began amassing silver coins, as well as their human subjects on both ends of the sword tip.  Could a life-way that requires amassing possessions beget demonic possession?  A cursory look into the religious and cultural stories that emerged among monied people appears to support this hypothesis. 

Many centuries after the indigenous people of this continent experienced, at the tip of the sword, baptism into the consumer marketplace, a few of them translated one of their conqueror’s religious stories this way: “Finding the way onto the good road from above is a hard thing for the ones who have many possessions.  It would be easier for a moose to squeeze through a beading needle.”¹  And also:

When the Separated Ones (Pharisees) saw Creator Sets Free (Jesus) eating with outcasts, they complained to his followers, saying, “Why does your wisdomkeeper eat with tribal tax collectors and outcasts?”

Creator Sets Free overheard them and said, “People who are well do not need medicine.  It is for the ones who are sick…I have not come for the ones with good hearts.  I have come to help the outcasts find the path back home again.”  Matthew 9:11-13

How could humans live without possessing places and bodies in the abstracted form of coins and dollars? 

As I have pondered this question over the years, one heartbreaking response laps patiently upon the shoreline of a modern, civilized imagination.  Perhaps my distant ancestors lived from relations rather than possessions, from a tangled web of affections rather than a carefully-guarded stockpile of securities.  Perhaps they lived within familial, multi-species ecologies rather than consumer market economies. 

Perhaps we could begin to weep for “earning a living,” the imprisoned and atrophied cousin of “passing along the outrageous gift of life to others through regular acts of unbridled generosity.”  These longings will swallow us whole if we force them to remain in the shadowy corners rather than allowing them out into the healing light of the village square.

I seem to have two specialties.  I regularly grant to others, through these written stories and wonderings, the tears that often remain elusive for me.  This money investigation will take a few weeks to work itself through, and so I invite you to carry the stirred emotions with a soft and forgiving hand this week.  The shame of the thing might be an opening into hollow heart of the thing itself.  We don’t have to become unlovable for having inherited a shame-and-grievance-generating way of living.  But perhaps we do have a responsibility to admit to one another that it hurts.  And hurts a lot. 

My second specialty is the Farm meatloaf that I make every week: liver, heart, tongues and lungs mixed with equal parts muscle meat from the animal.  Yesterday we cut and cubed the flesh from our two beloved family members numbered 105 and 65 and ground it with the cubed organs of their flock-mates, accumulated in the freezer over the course of the summer.  Each week I thaw a few quarts of that ground meat and organ mixture, knead into it cornmeal, garlic, herbs and salt, and bake it into a story-filled loaf, a slice of which you will undoubtedly be served if you come visit us at the Farm. 

There’s lots more to come on this topic, including a dreadfully-boring accounting of how one stays alive on less than four thousand dollars. 

With love, Adam

1. First Nations Version: An Indigenous Translation of the New Testament.